Short Reviews [Lunear - 2022 - "Gostraks"]

Although this is the third album by Lunear, it is not actually their third album as such, as they decided to cover a load of their favourite songs from 1980 up to fairly recently. I generally have an aversion to covers unless they manage to improve on the original, but am always willing to give anything a fair listen so I put this on while going for a healthy walk. The first song is “Turn It On Again”, but it actually starts with a take on “Guide Vocal” before segueing into the song itself. This introduction is heavily layered and synthesised, and totally loses the humanity and pathos of the original, so right from the beginning I was not feeling best pleased, and although the main track itself is much better, vocally this is also not quite right and much of the accompaniment is played fairly straight. “Modern Love” has a very similar production and arrangement treatment, almost as if an Eighties version of Alan Parsons was involved and trying to make everything seem to the same, but I was looking forward to “Warriors of the Western World” as one of my guilty pleasures is FGTH, yet this version has been sanitised with all the passion and bite removed from it, and whereas the original drives along with passion this is far more sedate and pointless. Also, I know this is a minor niggle on my part, but the word is “Warriors”, not “Wheriars”, and the drum machine behind this is nothing but plain annoying. I would like to say it got better from here on in, but unfortunately that is not the case even though the breadth of bands they cover from Britney Spears through Depeche Mode and Lana Del Rey was interesting, and ending the album with Marillion’s “This is the 21st Century” with “Mama” tagged onto the end worked well, but not enough to save it overall.